I was in Thailand last week and I visited the redlight districts. They hold a particular fascination to me, as they feel both nostalgic and dreamlike. They are nostalgic because they remind me of my own decade working in brothels and parlours; watching the girls interact with each other on the street gives me an acute homesickness for girls’ rooms. They are dreamlike because they offer a neon phantasm of what the redlight district of Kings Cross in Sydney was like in its heyday, or what I’d imagine Storyville in New Orleans was like in the early 1900s, when all the adult establishments were grouped together in one place and the culture was created by the sex workers within it.
Having moved through various shops across Australia—as part of the working-girl shuffle that we all partake in as we tire of a business or its clients or simply its rooms—I wonder what it would be like to work in a centralised location, where I could flit between venues and speak to other girls on the street. I’ve only come close to experiencing that once, in 2013 while working in Woolloomooloo—a harbourside inner-city suburb that has been both within and on the outskirts of a shifting redlight district—before lockout laws and gentrification gutted the whole area.
In Thailand, I found the sight of so many publicly visible sex workers intoxicating. I went to Nana Plaza and Soi Cowboy in Bangkok, and Boyztown and Walking Street in Pattaya, and in each district I patronised some go-go bars, which function partially as strip clubs in that they are for socialising and entertainment, but also as advertising, as the girls (or boys, in the case of Boyztown) can take clients to short-stay hotels nearby for further services. I was pleasantly surprised by the array of people I saw in the go-go bars. At one of the “ladyboy” bars, another lesbian couple (besides myself and my partner) were paying for the girls’ time through buying drinks. (When you purchase a girl a drink, she sits and chats with you for a bit.) In Boyztown, groups of middle-aged cis Thai women were excitedly pulling gay boys off the stage for drinks and conversation, while other gay boys played drinking games, as if it were a normal gay bar. In one bar I went to with friends, the girls got so excited by a gay guy friend of mine that they took him backstage, dressed him in their clothes and pushed him on stage to perform. At another, one of the girls shooed a friend of mine out of the front row, explaining and pointing “customer” at an older white man. She obviously recognised that, although we were paying for drinks, we weren’t planning to procure any further services. She was automatically classing clients into categories in the same way that I do, working out which are serious and worth prioritising.
Most women I know who’ve been to Thailand haven’t been to the redlight districts, and many people speak about such areas with disgust, mentioning how the economic imbalance between tourists like them and locals makes them feel exploitative. However, if you are a western tourist concerned about the economic imbalances between you and a local, you should be just as worried about how much less you’re paying someone for a bike ride or foot massage than you would in your own country. If you’re not, your issue is with sex, not the privilege gap.
So many westerners are preoccupied with being a “good” or “bad” tourist, and visiting the redlight districts falls firmly into what most people consider “bad”. I, however, am more concerned with being a “good or “bad” client: I want to go and not demand too much and be considerate and tip generously, all of which I appreciate from my own clients. And which is better for these workers, anyway? That no one goes and spends money—or that you go and spend money freely?
I’ve personally never paid for sex, but I know plenty of sex workers who have. There may come a time in my life when I do, too. There are plenty of other intimate services I’ve paid for, such as laser hair removal and teeth cleaning. And I have paid for a girl to sit with me and give me attention off the stage, in both go-go bars and strip clubs. (To be honest, I think it’s disrespectful to enter those spaces and not spend money on the workers.) I always want to be a “good client”, whatever I pay for and wherever I am.
